British Airwaves

“The Hour” and the seductive pleasure of formula.

The primal appeal of “The Hour,” set in the mid-fifties, is its journalistic love triangle.

Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg

Last year, “Downton Abbey” was everyone’s pet British drama. The show rebranded PBS. It drove fashion trends. The indie comedian Patton Oswalt began live-tweeting the damn thing.

I, too, was won over by the Titanic-era melodrama, calling it more cake than bread. When the Season 3 screeners arrived, I scarfed them right up—only to find that they tasted stale. On the surface, everything was much the same, with bleak country vistas, tilted violet hats, and one serious tragedy that made the tears well. But the zingers clunked, even those of the beloved dowager countess, who came to strike me as nothing more than a highbrow Sue Sylvester, from “Glee.” And, blame a year of exposure to the Romney campaign, but the Crawley family’s insistence that they were job creators stank of an unpleasant nostalgia. It can’t be a good sign when you find yourself Googling “Occupy Downton Abbey.”

“Downton Abbey” is just one of the many British dramas that have gained a reputation as high-class television: smarter, subtler, and more worldly than our native brand. There’s also “Luther,” a moody cop show starring Idris Elba (best known as Stringer Bell, from “The Wire”), and “Call the Midwife,” a picturesque postwar “Private Practice,” with more nuns. All these shows are well made—you can sink into one of their six-episode seasons as if it were a claw-foot tub full of bubbles in a bed-and-breakfast run by Laura Linney. But there’s nothing all that original going on: these series are high-end, sharply written twists on network staples. With a few exceptions (the astringent “Sherlock” comes to mind, as does “Doctor Who”), the current British dramas that make it to America are lush formula. They take a commercial genre, then add jazz or strings, a retro feel, solid cinematography, a grownup cast, and words like “wretched” and “daft.” In examining their destabilizing effect on American critical skills, one can’t discount the casting: able were we ere we saw Elba.

“The Hour,” a drama about a fictional BBC news show, set in the mid-fifties, is a notch above—or maybe I just have a thing for Ben Whishaw, who plays Freddie, the show’s intellectual heartthrob. The show is now in its second season, and, after I watched the first two episodes, “The Hour” replaced “Downton Abbey” as the show I can’t help but grade on a curve, because it’s too delicious. Set in roughly the same era as “Mad Men,” “The Hour” resembles that show in its resolute design fetishism: every yellow-shaded lamp is a portal to 1956. It features a Don Draperish rogue, a Betty-like wife, and a selection of enviable pencil skirts. Yet “The Hour” is no “Mad Men”: over four seasons, Matthew Weiner’s narcotic drama has swerved in endlessly odd, psychologically rich directions—and, when it fails, it fails out of ambition. “The Hour” is a more generic production, with a simpler appeal, and if you were in a bad mood you could probably poke right through its potboiler clichés.

But why bother? It’s defiantly smart and sexy. If you are a sucker for journalistic romance, this show will hit your buttons hard. The première of the second season opens with a shot of its heroine, the elegant Bel (Romola Garai), a producer for the news show, hammering away at her typewriter, wearing thick-framed black glasses, a cigarette dangling from her lips, occasionally pressing her fingertips to her perfect temples. Her colleague Lix leans against the doorway in high-waisted slacks. “If it all gets to be too much, I say we take the next train to Morocco,” Lix says, taking a sip from her tumbler. “Apparently, it’s the most m-a-a-arvellous place to get lost.” It might be the show’s slogan.

That said, I wasn’t fully on board for the show’s first season. The series’ many evangelists had described “The Hour” as a superior alternative to HBO’s “The Newsroom,” another drama about television news. Indeed, “The Hour” shares the gimmick of both that show and “Treme” (not to mention “Titanic”), planting fictional idealists amid traumatic real-life events, then letting them rave high-mindedly with the benefit of hindsight. “The Hour” is far less zany than “The Newsroom,” slinkier and more adult in its erotic appeal, but it does feature a full-office slow clap when its characters do the right thing.

“The Hour” also resembles “The X-Files,” at least in its focus on government conspiracies. Freddie spent very little of Season 1 reporting on the Suez crisis, the show’s ostensible subject, and far more obsessing over a faked suicide, a Soviet mole in the BBC, a code stolen from the suit lining of a corpse, and a crossword puzzle containing clues. (When spies put clues into crossword puzzles, it makes us all feel clever, like Words with Friends.)

This espionage arc didn’t blot out “The Hour” ’s appeal, but it was contrived, and reminded me how many television shows—both good and bad—rely on such perfidious schemes. Conspiracies form the spine of “Scandal,” “Homeland,” “Revenge,” “Fringe,” “Hunted,” “Nashville,” “Castle,” and “Grimm,” to name just the one-word dramas. From “Twin Peaks” on, they’ve been a salve for the anxieties of serial storytelling, guaranteeing that viewers will come back, if only to get an answer. They turn every protagonist into a detective: cops and doctors and journalists alike, digging for the truth, whatever the risk! Even better, a conspiracy allows for the helpful convention of a wall collage, or what the Web site TV Tropes calls the Room Full of Crazy. (Subsets include the professional Big Board, the romantically specific Stalker Shrine, and the yarn-and-pushpin String Theory.)

In “The Hour,” that board is appropriately old-school: in Season 1, Freddie had a corkboard, with tacked-up news columns about the death of a débutante. This year, the corkboard hovers by the desk of Freddie’s producer, Bel, and, to judge from early episodes, her investigation will have something to do with the rising crime rate, the production of Bettie Page-esque porn, and foreign-owned night clubs frequented by celebrities, cops, and showgirls. (“The Sopranos” may have inspired many quality dramas, but it is equally responsible for the rise of plots set in strip clubs.) The second season looks even more promising than the first, strengthening the show’s primal appeal: its journalistic love triangle, which is based on the “Broadcast News” archetype of lady producer, handsome anchor, and resentful best friend.

At its fulcrum is Bel, whom one suitor compliments for her “gravity.” Garai gives a sly, dogged, melancholic performance, turning curiosity into a desirable sexual characteristic. In the first season, Bel swung between the posh Hector (Dominic West), the show’s married lead presenter, with whom she had a hot, sad affair, and her brooding soul mate, the arrogant investigative reporter Freddie, played by my spiritual fiancé. By the final episode, every angle of that tripartite romance had exploded, and the second season begins the way second seasons do: finding excuses to get the old gang back together. Bel and Hector’s affair is over; Freddie’s been abroad, acquiring a French wife and a taste for Kerouac. A new BBC editor arrives, played by Peter Capaldi (best known as Malcolm on “The Thick of It”), a welcome live wire of acrid charisma. The script is full of hardboiled one-liners. “A lie has no legs,” one character remarks. “Now a scandal? That has wings.” Freddie explains his time in America this way: “Being a nobody in a country where everybody thinks they can be a somebody—that’s infectious.”

Just as “Homeland” heats up when Carrie and Brody lock eyes, “The Hour” ignites when its trio begins to argue about ethics, a dynamic that draws little distinction between ménage à trois and brainstorm. In the first episode of the new season, the three have a run-in in the BBC hallway. Hector, who has been in the doghouse for his late-night partying, slips Bel a leaked document, the way another man might offer up jewelry. “I thought it might spur on your Soho crime story,” he says. “Dynamite,” Bel purrs, cigarette dangling—sparking an argument with Freddie. And we were off. Workplace love triangles may be as conventional on TV as conspiracies, but, when the chemistry is this strong, I’m all in. ♦

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.